Website Update – Frustration then Satisfaction

[Updated Jan 20, 2007 – I no longer use Durable. I found that the drop down menus didn’t work in Safari so I swapped it out. I went out to the WordPress Theme Tester for Durable and found they didn’t work either.]

If you’ve been here before you know the site has a new design. I haven’t been happy with the categories and the way static pages aren’t included in searches. So I spent most of the weekend looking at and testing options, with a side quest into a failed WordPress upgrade.

The bottom line on on the WordPress upgrade is I think my ISP is doing something to prevent it although I can’t figure out what. WordPress was installed by the ISP (I ran a wizard). While I could follow the WordPress directions for the upgrade I ended up only displaying blank pages. So I bailed on that pretty quick.

I had been using K2 as my WordPress theme and I really liked it. But as I looked at plugins and options for handling categories or tags it added a level of complexity. The plugins I looked at didn’t work right and my lack of knowledge of PHP and HTML made it tough to troubleshoot since K2 added a layer of complexity. Rather than try to edit the K2 PHP and CSS files I decided to look into simpler theme. While I still have to edit php and css files, I figured it would be easier if I could use the standard WordPress documentation. I spent a little time at WordPress’s theme respository and found Durable from Blaze New Media.

[Updated 10 minutes after the original post.] Figures, right after submitting this post I figured out that it was only my ability to save the colors as the theme default generated an error. Once I logged off everything worked. So if you don’t like these colors, head up top and click on “Options”.

I also added a plugin called “Search For Everything” that allows searching of static pages, comments, drafts, attachments and metadata. I worked fine with the K2 theme. As previously mentioned, it doesn’t work with the default search of the Durable theme but does work with the detailed search.

Visitmy Durable page for info and links related to the Durable theme andmy WordPress page for info and links related to WordPress and the plugins I use.